Archive for June, 2011|Monthly archive page

… In the book I’m launching next week [ ‘IS ing’ (Veer Books 038) launched atPrague Microfestival 2011] the improvised performances had to find a book form, for the most part they were improvised read/writing so didn’t make use of the visual but towards the end I started to introduce other resistances while reading in order to keep facility or a reliance on facility at bay…

… I’ll have to deal with how I can read from a book which is mainly a transcription of improvisations, we’ll see…

… There are questions I’d like to ask in bringing this performance to a blog, web, or vimeo version. It may well be that very little needs done, a sense of archiving…

How is the host genre if you like or ‘platform’ to be considered when moving say from book to web, from performance to book, and i mean from your perspective, i have a sense of how i would ask questions of it as a poet/performer…

[4]

(5)

… The use of Irish that in the words of Theo Dorgan, ‘places us out of the language set of the boat’ specifically appeals to speaking and identity. It speaks to the individual ‘saying’, in the act of ‘saying’, not only in Irish but as an individual voice speaking out of its own boat.

The investigation for Ciall represented initially by this powerpoint presentation ‘abair’ points to the Gaeltacht sensibility depending in the end upon one premise that it keeps speaking that it keeps saying, that it keeps sounding.

Within my own register of voices the poet Maggie O’Sullivan speaks of growing up in Yorkshire with Irish Parents and how that has skewed her relationship to language. To paraphrase John Hall [1] this work places itself as a gerund ‘an action’ caught as a thing’. A performance of it would anticipate itself as a thing in action. The sensibility of the Gaeltacht is or has to be that of an action, an anticipation of a ‘we’, of a making of a present. Otherwise it ceases to be.

This work will use ‘abair’ as a score for an improvised read/writing that anticipates a reader, a viewer, an other making a meaning. That meaning is a present of activity. The Gaeltacht makes a present out of its own body of language, language of body, of I of mé, of tú, of muid. The world exists as and how we sing it into existence, anticipate its present. While it reaches graphically towards voice this work must retain its link to writing and reading, its focus is on the making of meaning and identity through language and the material bodies present in that activity the graphic sign and the reader /viewers body in equal focus. Senses and sense as poetics of the body.

VERYSMALLKITCHEN writes: The anarcheology here does not have to follow the temporality of a project that concluded in the event at An Gaileraí, Gweedore, Donegal, on 9th April 2011. Here, score comes after the documentation, and/or the proposal can be a conclusion.

Whilst the original purpose and function of each remaining fragment is in many cases evident, I think the opportunity of transition to a blog format like VerySmallKitchen is that these pieces can be (re-)figured into a sequence that offers new ideas about where and how the work is work is functioning.

Perhaps this is a non-hierarchical treatment of the different components that comprise, to adopt Joseph Grigely’s proposition [in his Exhibition Prosthetics (Bedford Press Editions, 2010)], the “prosthetic body” of language as it runs through all stages of the exhibition (and performance) process.

I have, though, whilst working with sequence and shifting temporalities, kept the various stages distinct, so that movement and adaptability also encounters and negotiates with the specificity of score, event, proposal, performance, document…

… with the further proviso, of course, that any transformation into a new context is a possibility embroiled with loss, gaps, (non-) human error, constellation up and down grade, deletions themselves erased by further dis-/re-/placements, provocations….

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… the one thing missing and turned down a bit too much during the performance on the vimeo is the multi voice pieces during the métúsésímuidsibhsiad transitions, but i’m always open to interpretation, there is a direction of development in some investigative sense so the poem sort of digs towards an unknown goal considering the call by the gallery so the gaelic comes more at the end but very much in concordance with the poetics of the opening, that is the transgression of the grammar which nearly all gaelic work I’ve seen overly adheres to.

The breaking of the grammar, how that considers language is purposefully basic in part to allow space for performance but also to allow greater opening into the language as a future project…

One reading of John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (2011) is as a handbook elucidating a practice of the secret. Or, unfolding both from and into that, a workings, a politics, a poetics, of what his book identifies as generative, necessary and constructive about the secret, hidden and inconsequential.

This post is a notebook through Berger’s text, a commonplace book of the direct engagements with such ideas that appear in its 178 pages. Such ideas, of course, are also implicit in the essay-ings and drawings that comprise Berger’s book.

It’s the possibilities of this movement between explicit and implicit, fusions and specificities of writing/ reading/ drawing/ thinking/ talking/ looking/ experiencing/ understanding/ critiquing/ and/ self/ other that motivates here, spiraling off into examples and implications whilst aware of matter-resonance of word- lexicon’s themselves as conveyers and containers.

The secret resists attempts to understand it. This is how the practice of the secret commences, continues and conveys.

1. BEGINNINGS

(a)We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination. (9)

(b)…we smiled and glanced at one another. And somewhere behind our agreement was the tacit recognition that any original political initiative has to start off as being clandestine, not through a love of secrecy, but because of the innate paranoia of the politically powerful. (42)

(c) Yet, if we imagine the stories being told across the world tonight and consider their outcome, I believe we’ll find two main categories: those whose narratives are emphasising something essential that is hidden [invisible,86], and those which emphasise the revealed. (72)

2.PROTEST

(a)Yet what one is warning and protesting continues unchecked and remorselessly [this essay is a letter to Arundhati Roy]. Continues irresistably. Continues as if in a permissive, unbroken silence. Continues as if nobody had written a single word. So one asks oneself: Do words count? And there must sometimes come back a reply something like this: Words here are like stones put into the pockets of roped prisoners before they are thrown into a river. (79)

(b)To protest is to refuse being reduced to zero and to an enforced silence. Therefore, at the very moment a protest is made, if it is made, there is a small victory. The moment, although passing like every moment, acquires a certain indelibility. It passes, yet it has been printed out. A protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative, more just future; it is an inconsequential redemption of the present. The problem is how to live time and again with the adjective inconsequential. (80)

(c) When we are impressed and moved by a story, it engenders something that becomes, or may become, an essential part of us, and this part, whether it be small or extensive, is, as it were, the story’s descendent or offspring… those stories that shape us are our coincidental, as distinct from biological ancestors. (84)

3.STORIES

(a)Which of the two [introverted or extroverted stories] is likely to be more adapted to, more trenchant bout what is happening in the world today? I believe the first. (86)

(b)Because its stories remain unfinished. Because they involve sharing. Because in their telling a body refers as much to a body of people as to an individual. Because for them mystery is not something to be solved but to be carried. Because, although they may deal with sudden violence or loss or anger, they are long-sighted. And, above all, because there protagonists are not performers but survivors. (86)

(c)There are two forms of continuity: the acknowledged one of institutions and the unacknowledged one of clandestinity. (87)

(d)The heartfelt hopes, once exemplified in triumphant Hollywood stories, have now become obsolete and belong to another epoch. Hope today is a contraband passed from hand to hand and from story to story. (87)

4.SECRET SIGHTINGS

(a)The Prado in Madrid to look at Velasquez’s Buffoons

They have a secret which it has taken me years to fathom and which maybe still escapes me. (93)

Juan the Pumpkin’s still eyes look at the parade of life and at us through a peephole from eternity. This is the secret that a meeting in the Rambla suggested to me. (96)

Velasquez, Juan Calabazas (Juan the Pumpkin)

(b)A budget supermarket in a suburb of Paris

It’s the opposite of a street market, where the key secret is that of a bargain. In a street market everyone encourages everyone to believe they’ve just made a smart deal; here, every one of us is being considered as a potential thief. (104)

(c)Motorbikes and Drawing

for many years I’ve been fascinated by a certain parallel between the act of piloting a bike and the act of drawing. The parallel fascinates me because it may reveal a secret. About what? Displacement and vision. Looking brings closer. (111)

Velasquez, Juan Calabazas (Juan the Pumpkin)

NOTE (1): Berger’s “secret” is the ________, _______ of __________ not yet thought through. Learning as based around the secret, changes/charges pedagogy. Maybe something else has been told in lieu of the secret. Learning depends on how likely you are believed (by the secret itself) to be a keeper.

Learning becomes removed from metaphors of “bringing into the light” or increased spatial intimacy. The learner is drawn further into the secret, trying to understand it through whispered, implied, hinted, invisible zones of mishearing.

NOTE (2): The secret is present in/forms (learning) meetings with strangers. It is mediated and given physical form through the acknowledgement/ encouragement of gift giving and receiving. “Gifts should affect the recipient so deeply as to startle him” writes Walter Benjamin.

5.ENDINGS OPENINGS HOPES

(a) I live in a state of habitual confusion. By confronting the confusion I sometimes achieve a certain lucidity. You showed us how to do this. (139)

(b)When I’m drawing I feel a little close to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter if pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells. (149)

(c)There is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer [Berger writes of his drawing of the Russian writer Andrei Platonov], to enter the self of what is being drawn and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and an au revoir! Alternately and ad infinitum. (156)

(2)particularly Photocopies and The Shape of a Pocket, how a writing so concerned with certain forms of attention, commitment, witness, comes to an essaying of people, places, paintings/-ers, the personal migrations, choices of biography, necessary to such a practice

(3)of Andy Warhol’s AMERICA, reissued 2011 as a Penguin Classics (images above). An affinity with Bento’s Sketchbook that can align both around a rejuvenated project of the inconsequential secret constrained neither to rural France or Manhattan

… it’s called ‘abair’ which is the gaelic verb ‘to say’ though ironically in the end my performance was mute at least verbally, in part due to the type of attention a ‘formal’ art audience was prepared to give especially in the circumstances of this particular exhibition and its subject…

… it became quite different to what i was setting up originally, much more visual and less vocal other than the sounds recorded on the powerpoint, the joys of improvisation, it was very good for me from the experience point of view in that you tend to learn a lot more in that way…

… I’ll be working on a book version but that will take the next year off and on and will have to deal with the different materiality of experience just as Caroline Bergvall moved and changed between book, installation and web version for éclat…

It is compiled by VerySmallKitchen – not present at the event itself – in response to an invitation from aodán to work with the numerous traces of the event towards an online presence for the project.

These included: its written score, the event proposal, the performance and installation itself, and how it was documented in email, still, sound and moving image.

Or not, for as aodán observes in an email 05/05/11:

The subsequent improvised site specific performance is a conversation that has been lost as both video cameras failed for different reasons. It will hopefully be glimpsed in its still silence at VerySmallKitchen… The blog there will be an archeological dig of the remnants.

VERYSMALLKITCHEN writes: Susan Thomson’s THE AUTHOR OF UNUSUAL PAPERS is a wall text that opens an exhibition of the same title at Dublin’s The LAB (27 May- 25 June 2011). A row of headphones extend an invitation to hear the text read aloud.

The text also appears on the handout/ brochure for the show, which also includes work from Claire Behan, Diana Caramaschi, Monica Flynn, and Colleen Lambe. This informs me that “following several months discussions amongst the artists a body of work emerged in response to this text.”

Several projects and texts on VerySmallKitchen have explored the relationship of writing and exhibition. I was interested in how this text seemed to function variously as proposal, fiction, catalogue essay, and art work. I wondered how it would function in the further context of this blog.

THE AUTHOR OF UNUSUAL PAPERS is reprinted below, followed by a short essay from Susan in response to an email from VerySmallKitchen 31/05/11 asking how she understood the functions of such a text.

Am I the author of this text, and if not, who is? I have examined the text for evidence of my usual themes, subjects, preoccupations, sentence length, adjective use etc. I have found many key words that correspond to articles I have written in the past. Desire, the self, blank, return of the repressed, art, Glasgow, time, lovers and many more. It seems that I may be the author of this text.

While it is perhaps a more unusual text written by me, I think that I have written it. No, more than that, I feel sure that I have written it. Then, there is the fact that it is a self-reflexive text, a text about identity, that it is a text searching for an author, and that makes me even more convinced of my own authorship. The author is in question, a kind of detective story unleashed, and forensic linguistics is the detective’s tool digging up clues, the lists of similar nouns, like echoes, a stylistic marker of my work, the self-referential, the endless mirrors, mise en abime. Forensic linguistics allows me to dig into what I think is my own writing in order to see more clearly: was it really me who wrote this? Why was it written? What are the clues and what do they point to?

Stylometry makes me cry. What if I am not the author? My sentence lengths are variable, the algorithm learns my style. There is a characterization of which papers are most and least typical for a given author; when I am most myself in my writing and when I am least. And which if either is better? Or when I am most consistently myself at any rate. The text is reduced to a bag of words. I will make it as consistent with myself as possible, in the future. Death, desire, sex, food, text. Why can I write nothing new, nothing inconsistent, nothing that a piece of software would pass over, not merely as an unusual paper for me, but instead a text that is so different that it would simply fail to recognise it as emanating from me. It must be by someone else. But why do I desire this at all? Better surely to accept the prison of my own limitations, of my personality, my style, whatever that is. It’s predicting my words…

Is this an overlapping text, one in which the authors bleed into one another, or co-author? The first trope consists entirely of French words. There was an apparent peaking of French words in the mid-1990’s. The more red a word, the more likely it is to have been generated by me, the more blue by someone else, the nameless author.
The resulting author model was shown to extract significant hidden information about the author, from the set of abstracts, including all the unusual papers for specific authors. And so we may conclude with a question, is it always the same old story or is there the possibility of an author writing a text that cannot be detected as her own.

Susan Thomson, The Author of Unusual Papers; The Lost Word, installation text, books, copies of manuscripts

Post Script

The text is now a post-script I suppose. It has become audio, in a play version of itself, and is now on the blogosphere, post-play.

It has mutated and spawned versions of itself, mimicry in the text in the windows, things I never wrote but it looks like I wrote them.[1]

The text is now in multiple places; the springboard-text for the show, in the handout, on the wall, through the earphones, on the blog; it seems to be reproducing itself at an alarming rate. The text is in transit. Who knows where it will go next? And still the author has not been found, ascertained.

There is a Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squires’, where the case involves handwriting analysis. A torn piece of paper is found in the murdered man’s hand. Finally, Sherlock deduces that it was father and son who had alternately written each word of the note. Copies of Arthur Conan Doyle’s letters to Roger Casement appear in the show, as well as a copy of Casement’s Black Diaries.[2]

The Black (overtly homosexual) Diaries and White (day to day censored) Diaries is the Reigate story’s historical opposite in that it was believed the diaries were by two separate authors but handwriting analysis subsequently proved both to be authored by him. Conan Doyle and Casement step up to the task, spilling ink for one another, and they sit now in a museum, the ink dried up and their tears lying in the manuscript room.

Our childhood portraits hang in the gallery, painted or drawn from childhood photos after the fact. [3] We all become Dorians living on in youth in the gallery as our adult selves wander the streets. The artists pull facts, words, signs, insights from the text and knowledge they have about my life into their own work. They psychoanalyse and try and reveal through metaphor what lies between the lines. They convert the words into visuals, apply semiological analysis. [4]

Then they add their own personalities, their own thoughts, lives, analyses. They explore archetypes, they animate a month of unusual papers, an unusual paper for every day.[5]

The text on the wall is pinned beside the audio version; with the audio came voice, the freedom to walk around the gallery; with the text, the pleasure of reading. Many seemed to return to their childhoods and opted for both at once. Like learning a new language, in a language booth.

I know who the author is, yes; but the author, invisible, unnameable, has just left the building, escaping, minutes before the show opens, the scene of the crime.

Last week’s trip to Dublin for ART CRITICISM NOW was a chance to find out about a whole host of art writing projects in the city and beyond, running the spectrum from critical writing projects to art-language initiatives of diverse kinds. This post offers a run through of those projects, continuing an exploration of where one becomes the other, or how a practice might involve/ combine/move between these different possibilities of practice.

At the criticism end of the spectrum is +BILLION- , which began as a one person blog by James Merrigan, currently has a call for writers, and published its own summary of the Art Criticism Now event within a few hours of it finishing. Like the other writing on the site it’s a cogent, focused, informed critique, intelligently aware, as the archive on its site is named, that JUDGMENT CALLS.

On the same panel, Cristín Leach of the Sunday Times recalled being told at an opening: “I don’t know how you dare to show your face in here.” She recalled how, as a starting out journalist, a newspaper editor had told her not to write catalogue essays if she wanted to write for the newspaper, and how it still felt important to hold to that distinction. It was a position useful to consider alongside what can seem the art world’s default position of an embedded writing practice that sees no problems moving wherever opportunities (and payment) allow.

BILLION was responding to Jason Oakley of VAN (The Visual Artists’ News Sheet), who had outlined a soon to be launched review supplement to the publication which explicitly briefed writers to evaluate shows under discussion. It’s interesting that within such contexts straight, traditional reviewing becomes the only appropriate form of writing. Whilst I value such an approach as one among a number of possibilities, I am not sure it has the value as either discourse, PR and/or intellectual capital that it is often ascribed, or that expanded writing practices don’t offer more possibilities for an organisation like Visual Artists’ Ireland to fulfill its broader remit of support and advocacy on behalf of professional visual artists.

As in the UK, my sense was that the potentials of an exploratory criticism is more evident in grass roots initiatives, like BILLION and paper visual art journal. These tend to be unfunded DIY initiatives, which might give them a limited life cycle, but opens up distinct possibilities as long as the writing and editing of such publications can be juggled with all the other jobs and activities their organisers and contributors are likely to be engaged in.

Edited by Niamh Dunphy, Paper Visual Art Journal’s tagline reveals its difference in emphasis from +BILLION-, self-describing itself as “an online publication for contemporary art. Paper recognises the vacuum of critique and dialogue that exists for the emerging artist or artist group, between graduate and established art practice. The emphasis, at outset, is to address this.”

Critical articles are published alongside listings, artist profiles (perhaps best described as showcases), and Insight, a new series of texts on artist run spaces. The project is seems one where different functions of criticism, information, and gallery are all “embedded together” (it made me think again of John Kelsey’s writing/ art/ gallerist role combinations) and it will be interesting to see how this mixture unfolds. At ART CRITICISM NOW, Dunphy spoke of a hands on editorial approach, wanting to ensure writers said what they wanted to say rather than what they thought they should say.

Allotrope, Issue 1, 2011

Encountering all these projects, made me wonder what the equivalents were in London – a scene that, chatting in the bar afterwards, we decided was best described as “nebulous”. Most of the London projects I could think about as having an equivalent energy and dynamism to +BILLION- or paper visual art journal were artist led magazines like Art Licks, spaces for artists writing about their own work, print spaces for practice itself rather than locations for critique and review, experimental or otherwise.

The day was also a chance to pick up a copy of the broadsheet format Enclave Review, produced in Cork, edited by Fergal Gaynor and Ed Krčma and whose current issue very much places local exhibitions in an international (and often big-name) context (Issue 3 has pieces on Beuys/ Broodthaers/ Zaha Hadid/ Nancy Spero). Like other publications here, ER seems very much to be finding a space for in depth essays on contemporary art and thinking through how that is reflected in decisions about print and online distribution (in their case, a freely distributed broadside is followed up by online PDF’s once the free print copies are no longer available).

Moving along the problematic but useful creative critical spectrum I find Allotrope with its themed inaugural issue on Lies. Allotrope is produced through the University of Ulster, edited by Emma Dwan O’Reilly and Keith Winter, and, at least in my and several other cases, was distributed in the lift on the way up to Art Criticism Now. It takes the format of a single folded sheet which contains image-text contributions from 21 writers and artists including Amanda Coogan, Daniel Jewesbury and Douglas Park.

There is no web site for Allotrope, but a second edition on lists (each issue is produced in a limited, numbered edition) will be published alongside University of Ulster Festival of Art & Design, Belfast, Ireland, 4 – 19th June 2011. As the images above show, it’s a lively magazine, whose single sheet format, unfolded and turned around again and again to be read, deliberately somewhat unwieldy and initially disorientating, reflects the tangled deception of its theme as it impacts on authorial voice and language. To find out more email allotropepress@gmail.com

The two days were also a chance to catch up on the projects of Jennie Guy, with whom I collaborated on one of Reading Ensemble projects in January, and the events curator, Fiona Fullam, also responsible for the Art/Writing/Talks series in Dublin, Carrick-on-Shannon, and Bristol last fall, and which will shortly be appearing as a print publication.

In the galleries of Dublin there were several relationships of writing and exhibition to explore. At Project Arts Centre, Sarah Browne’s Second Burial at Le Blanc, includes a pile of free newspapers, entitled “On Hoarding, Accumulating and Gifting: A visual essay in preparation for a film by Sarah Browne.”

Each page of the newspaper contains a photo in a sandwich of English and French language text that describes the situation in Le Blanc, a French town that has revitalised its economy by being a place where it is still possible to exchange french francs. Browne’s newspaper moves out from Le Blanc through a wider frame of quotations, notes and images on economics, globalization and the (gift) economy.

If the text is a preparation for the film, it is also catalogue, explication, handout and document. Without it there is something more surreal about the 16mm film projection of the shopkeepers procession, carefully carrying the ticker tape machine (which is also in the gallery, positioned where I might have expected the projector to be) through the town.

The show is most satisfying, however, once newspaper and film can infect each other with their different modes, combining into a parable as much, of course, about Ireland as France, the present future as the past present.

Two final projects exploring the relationshiop of writing and exhibition: tHREE THOUSAND AND NINE, is a book of short fiction alongside an exhibition by Brian Duggan, which itself has as a starting point E.M.Forster’s novella The Machine Stop. The book feature stories by Daniel Boland, Pauline O’Hare and Niamh MacAlister, an image sequence by Duggan, and an afterword by Francis McKee, whose suggestive beginnings I could imagine being productively adapted for a future ART CRITICISM NOW:

Any unreliable history needs to duck and dive between parallel dimensions, combining improbabilities in a story that connives with its unscrupulous author. A decent account of science fiction in Ireland needs such deviance. Throwing academic propriety to the wind, imagine for a moment that the beginnings of this story could be seen as a film script. (75)

,

Finally, looking at The Author of Unusual Papers exhibition in the LAB, I noticed the text which Susan Thomson had placed on the handout for the show, and on a wall as one entered the exhibition, where it could also be listened to on several sets of headphones.

I was intrigued by the text and its multiple functions, as both a piece of critical writing, a fiction, a curatorial statement, and a script for this exhibition developed by Susan with Claire Behan, Diana Caramaschi, Monica Flynn (who maintains the contemporary art-writing blog Nelly’s Room) and Colleen Lambe. The complete text, with a short essay by Susan on and around its workings, is forthcoming on VerySmallKitchen.

Connections of language, writing, reading and art practice, inside and outside the VerySmallKitchen. Currently also inhabiting The Ruins of Hastings. Contact David Berridge at verysmallkitchen@gmail.com